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The Evolution of Apple’s Differential Privacy

So while I applaud Apple for trying to improve privacy within its business models, I would like some more transparency and some more public scrutiny.

Do we know enough about what’s being done? No, and my bet is that Apple doesn’t know precisely what they’ll ship, and aren’t answering deep technical questions so that they don’t mis-speak. I know that when I was at Microsoft, details like that got adjusted as we learned from a bigger pile of real data from real customer use informed things. I saw some really interesting shifts surprisingly late in the dev cycle of various products.

I also want to challenge the way Matthew Green closes: “If Apple is going to collect significant amounts of new data from the devices that we depend on so much, we should really make sure they’re doing it right — rather than cheering them for Using Such Cool Ideas.”

But that is a false dichotomy, and would be silly even if it were not. It’s silly because we can’t be sure if they’re doing it right until after they ship it, and we can see the details. (And perhaps not even then.)

But even more important, the dichotomy is not “are they going to collect substantial data or not?” They are. The value organizations get from being able to observe their users is enormous. As product managers observe what A/B testing in their web properties means to the speed of product improvement, they want to bring that same ability to other platforms. Those that learn fastest will win, for the same reasons that first to market used to win.

Next, are they going to get it right on the first try? No. Almost guaranteed. Software, as we learned a long time ago, has bugs. As I discussed in “The Evolution of Secure Things:”

Its a matter of the pressures brought to bear on the designs of even what (we now see) as the very simplest technologies. It’s about the constant imperfection of products, and how engineering is a response to perceived imperfections. It’s about the chaotic real world from which progress emerges. In a sense, products are never perfected, but express tradeoffs between many pressures, like manufacturing techniques, available materials, and fashion in both superficial and deep ways.

Green (and Schneier) are right to be skeptical, and may even be right to be cynical. We should not lose sight of the fact that Apple is spending rare privacy engineering resources to do better than Microsoft. Near as I can tell, this is an impressive delivery on the commitment to be the company that respects your privacy, and I say that believing that there will be both bugs and design flaws in the implementation. Green has an impressive record of finding and calling Apple (and others) on such, and I’m optimistic he’ll have happy hunting.